Networks interconnecting computers or other hosts to one another are increasingly used to support real time communications, in addition to the transfer of data files. When use of a computer network in connection with voice telephony, video telephony, or other real time communications is desired, it is often advisable to test the network in order to determine whether a sufficient level or quality of service can be provided for such uses. For example, packet loss rates, transmit time (delay) and arrival time variations (jitter) of data packets all must be within certain limits in order to provide an acceptable level of service for real time communications. Furthermore, the network should be capable of supporting one or more quality of service enabling technologies, such as the resource reservation protocol (RSVP).
In order to assess the ability of a data network to support real time communications, such as Internet protocol (IP) telephony, probes and sniffers to generate network traffic and measure network performance by observing characteristics such as packet loss, jitter, delay and support for quality of service enabling technologies usually must be deployed. However, many current Internet protocol networks, such as IPv.4 networks, are restricted in the number of spare IP addresses left to allocate. Therefore, the introduction of probes or new traffic onto a network can have a detrimental effect on the existing traffic and network capacity. In particular, the deployment of probes and sniffers on a network can compromise measurements of that network's performance. Also, by adding new traffic, more of the available network bandwidth and processing power is consumed.
In addition to problems with network congestion and capacity that can be introduced by adding probes, some systems for performing such testing require the addition of hardware to networks. Such hardware can be in the form of stand-alone computers, single board computers or servers. Furthermore, even if probes are deployed as software applications on existing network entities, the problems noted above with respect to the addition of network traffic and network entities remain. Furthermore, test facilities that are added as software to existing network entities as an additional application compete with other applications on the network entity for resources, potentially adversely affecting the performance of the network entity.